Wall Street Bears, Crypto Bulls: Litecoin (LTC) Most Consistent Major

Litecoin (LTC) – No matter where you might be in the US, you can pretty much feel the tension emanating from Wall Street. The DOW Jones Industrial Average dropped almost a thousand points within a week after a perfect storm of bad news—the Fed raised their interest rates for the sixth time since the 2009 financial crisis; Facebook stocks plunged after a public relations debacle stemming from compromised information of millions of users; Trump issued tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum; and more, much more.

If it weren’t for the fact that the stock market closes at the end of the day, who knows where Friday’s free fall would have ended.

Analysts have been warning that the nine-year bull run that Wall Street has seen could be near an end. And it looks like those warnings are probably true. How much the stock market might continue to fall however doesn’t seem to be a concern for cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Because as stocks have been plummeting, the cryptocurrency’s version of the Dow Jones—the cci30—has shown cryptocurrencies leveling off after a tough eight weeks, but now showing strong recovery here at the end of March.

So in other words, the world of crypto is looking good. Wall Street, not so good.

Although the stabilizing of Bitcoin may be seen by the financial sector as the key indicator of the cryptocurrency sector’s health, one of the other major coins has shown the type of stability that Bitcoin has—and that’s Litecoin. The steady but sure Litecoin (LTC) has fluctuated this week less than any of the majors, maintaining its value in a highly consistent, stable trajectory.

A very stable week for Litecoin (LTC): Image source: coinmarketcap.com

WHERE IS THE JUICE?

Wall Street investors however in all honestly probably don’t have any interest in the cryptocurrency sector’s health. They want profits, and the big question on everyone’s mind is if there is a fourth gear to cryptocurrency. Although Bitcoin has been around in some form since 2009, it wasn’t traded until about 2011. But those early days of trading on Mt. Gox were a tiny srpig in the growth cycle of alt-coin. The years between 2014 and 2017—second gear—were the years that the alt-coin sector gained enough momentum to begin to be recognized by mainstream media. After The New York Times published the infamous “Bitcoin Scrapes $10,000 – an Investment Boom Like No Other” in November, 2017, the alt-coin sector zoomed into third gear and the sector went wild, with alt-coins pretty much across the board surging in value up to about 3,000 percent within three weeks of that publication.

Crypto analysts pretty much credit this massive surge in Wall Street investment, spurred by the NY Times piece, for December 2017’s alt-coin price spike, a phenomenon known as The Wall Street Rush. Analysts however also credit Wall Street dumping for the subsequent fall of cryptocurrency which started mid-January 2018 and has pretty much continued into the last couple of weeks, when alt-coin prices seem to have stabilized.

But truth be known, Wall Street investors generally didn’t know what they were dealing with in the alt-coin sector. To most of them, alt-coin speculation was exactly that, a chance to make quick profits, and those rush investors did that—they profited considerably, and then they dumped.

That Wall Streeters didn’t know what they were dealing with however is precisely why they’re wondering if there is any future to cryptocurrency.

But there is, there definitely, definitely is.

Now that cryptocurrency has entered into a new era—an era where coin value is tied to real-world use, such as XRP’s significant inroads into the financial sector, being used live by Cuallix, the international financial service, in testing phase by Western Union, MoneyGram, and numerous other financial services.

This use-case era for cryptocurrency represents the fourth gear for the alt-coin sector, a time when many cryptocurrencies will become valueless, while others—those alt-coins that play a real role for the inherent qualities of the coin’s design as well as their structured application and integration—will continue to surge.

FOURTH GEAR IS OFFICIALLY HERE

So far cryptocurrency has weathered Wall Street’s January dump like a champ. Although many criticize crypto for generally having lost half to two-thirds of its value (depending on the coin) in the last 10 weeks, what they aren’t pointing out is that over a year’s time, major coins like Litecoin (LTC) are still up more than 3,000 percent.

Now there are more than 1,400 coins traded on the world’s more than 100 exchanges. Less than 10 percent of those coins have any real function. Most are coins released to support funding ideas, projects that founders propose to accomplish in ways that are not tied to the coin they are promoting, but merely promise to simply use coin proceeds to carry out some great idea. As Wall Streeters continue to dive back into the cryptocurrency sector, look for the majors to continue their upward trend, as well as late-comer coins that are truly being used for the qualities of their coin in real world application.

ADVISORY: I am not a financial advisor and I do not suggest speculating in alt-coin. The information in this op-ed is opinion and commentary only and it should not be construed as financial advice. Some information in this article comes from generally circulating content in news reports and industry web sites. I own some alt-coin, including XRP and LTC, but not much and I don’t day trade.